Chicago today
While flying from Columbus Ohio to St. Louis today, I stopped over in cloudy/misty Chicago. Here's how downtown looked from above the airport.
To get serious about sustainability, move back to the city.
According to Witold Rybczynski (writing in The Atlantic), it's time to get serious about living sustainably. Currently, we do that by going out to buy the latest and greatest gadgets for saving energy. There's a much better foundation for accomplishing this goal of living sustainably:
The problem in the sustainability campaign is that a basic truth has been lost, or at least concealed. Rather than trying to change behavior to actually reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. Keep doing what you’re doing, goes the message. Just add a solar panel, a wind turbine, a hybrid engine, whatever. But a solar-heated house in the burbs is still a house in the burbs, and if you have to drive to it, even in a Prius, it’s hardly green.Instead of putting little Band-Aids on the big problem, Rybczynski argues that we ought to move back to the city. We would save much more energy by prohibiting spread-out low-rise buildings than by pasting solar panels on them. "A reasonably well-built and well insulated multifamily building is inherently more sustainable than a detached house." He advocates three or four story "walk-ups," which don't require elevators. These can create sufficient density "about 50 people per acre, to support public transit, walk ability and other urban amenities." Another important approach is to focus on the way we construct our commercial buildings. When we combine residences with commercial and institutional structures, buildings consume 48% of our energy, more than any other sector.
Is the goal of health care reform merely to save lives?
Is the goal of health care reform merely to save lives? If so, there are much better ways to do it than universal health insurance, as indicted by Daniel Akst in The Atlantic:
A new Harvard study estimates that lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans annually, which is 2.5 times as many as the previous best estimate commonly cited in the health care debate. This is a big difference (27,000 additional lives). But it still pales in comparison with the more than one million Americans who die annually by their own hands--which they use to light cigarettes, lift forks and convey too many alcoholic beverages to their lips.
George Orwell’s concept of doublethink
I recently read George Orwell's concept of doublethink and was impressed with how well he foresaw the way we would become:
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.Beautifully terrifying given its prevalence in these times. Here's a recent example: Selective Deficit Disorder. Now let's get it straight. Are large budget deficits terrible or not? The answer is that it depends:
Where, for instance, were the conservative protest marchers when President George W. Bush vastly expanded the deficit with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy? Where was Sen. Lincoln’s concern for “deficit neutrality” when she voted to give $700 billion to the thieves on Wall Street? Where was Obama’s “dime standard” when he proposed a budget that spends far more on maintaining bloated Pentagon budgets than on any universal health care proposal being considered in Congress? Where were demands for “fiscal sanity” by Brooks and other right-wing pundits when they cheered on the budget-busting war in Iraq? Where were the calls from these supposed “deficit hawks” to raise taxes when they backed all this profligate spending? And where were the journalists asking such painfully simple questions? They were nowhere to be seen or heard, because those plagued by Selective Deficit Disorder (as the name suggests) are only selectively worried about deficits.
Homeland Security seeks to “simplify” color warning system
Two weeks ago I briefly pointed out that Janet Napolitano, Secretary for Homeland Security, said that she wanted to reduce the level of fear in this country through improving preparedness for a terrorist attack. Now Homeland Security is seeking to do away with any pretense that we will ever be safe. Their latest proposal is to improve the "public credibility" of the system by"simplifying" the color scheme. If the recommendations are adopted, the new color scheme would consist only of yellow, orange, and red. Or, as Wendy McElroy put it, "the new levels are 1. Be Afraid, 2. Be Very Afraid, 3. Panic!" While I'm heartened that they at least admit that it's "institutionally difficult" to lower the threat level, I still don't believe that the color scheme is an ideal solution. Keeping one's citizens in a constant state of fear that they will be attacked is, I believe, one way for the government to keep the public's attention diverted from the causes of terrorist attacks-- namely, our governments policies. If we were to stop killing innocent civilians around the world, we may just find that people around the world no longer wish to kill us in retaliation.